The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• The bard stops interrupting his own music
• An on screen keyboard and a real MIDI piano
• One period tune becomes seventy six
• The achievements journal and a realm wide celebration
• Dungeon prize chests and the first placeable traps

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British before thee, with the reckoning of what thy makers were about yesterday. The realm possessed one tune to its name and now hath seventy six. A bard could be struck dumb by his own song, and shall be so no longer. Thou mayest plug a true keyboard into the game and play upon it with thine own hands. Every deed thou hast quietly earned these many years at last hath a book to be read in. And the lord of a dungeon may lay his own gold in a chest and dare thee to come and take it. Much to tell. Let us begin with the bard, for he has suffered enough.

Picture it. You are standing in the square in Soltown with a lute in your hands. You have a crowd. The music is going. And you decide, because you are a bard and this is what bards do, to cast one of your own bard songs. The moment the cast begins, your character puts the lute away, and the music stops.

That is how it has worked. Every song, every flourish, every dance. Cast anything at all and the instrument goes back on your belt. The only player in the game reliably capable of silencing a bard was that bard.

That is fixed. Songs, Flourish, Dance and Group Dance all play through now, and the dance animation runs over the top of the music instead of ending it. While we were in there we made Performance Stance the actual switch for performing. Take the stance and your weapon goes away, your instrument comes up, and if you are in a town your performance opens. Drop the stance and it all closes down again. Previously, taking your performance stance drew a weapon and flagged you as ready for combat, which is a bold way to open a concert.

The entertainer abilities also moved off your combat deck. They now live on a bard bar of their own, built the same way the emote bar is. Turn it on under Interface, drag it where you want it, stand it upright or lay it flat. It fills itself with whatever you have trained and shows your cooldowns, and it holds nothing but the four entertainer skills. Performing no longer means giving up deck slots you wanted for fighting.

There is a trade in it. Performance Stance, Flourish, Dance and Group Dance are now refused outside towns and player owned towns, which is where a performance has always actually counted for anything. In exchange, the party songs let go of the stance entirely. Savage Sonata, Rhapsody, Melody, Dirge and Requiem work anywhere in the world with an instrument in your hands, provided you have dealt no damage for sixty seconds.

And watching a bard works across a room now. The check deciding whether you could see the performer measured foot to foot along the ground, so a kerb, a step, a gentle slope, any of them blocked it, and a watch would only begin if the two of you were very nearly touching. It measures from eye level now, and facing a performer ignores the height between you, so a bard up on a stage counts properly. Better still, watching a performance now lengthens the blessings, food, potions and songs you were already carrying, rather than only the ones you cast afterward, and a line in chat tells you when it happens.

Now. The keyboard. Ready an instrument and a keyboard appears on your screen. Eight white keys running from C up to C, five black keys for the sharps, and a control that shifts the whole thing an octave up or down. Click a key to play it. Hold the mouse down to hold the note. Drag the thing wherever you like on screen and it stays there.

Here is the part I love. Each white key has its number key printed on it. The number row across the top of your keyboard has played those eight notes for years, and nothing anywhere in the game ever said so. Not a tooltip, not a hint, nothing. Our documentation for playing music was, essentially, press buttons until something pleasant occurs. So the on screen keyboard doubles as the reference sheet that never existed, and pressing one through eight lights up the matching key.

Bagpipes and the accordion draw their black keys and their octave control greyed out, because both of those are recorded one note per key and have never been capable of a sharp or an octave change. Offering a player a button that does nothing is worse than not offering it. And double clicking a key no longer ends your performance, because the game used to read a double click anywhere at all as a request to stop playing. A keyboard you are meant to click on repeatedly was always going to run into that one.

Then the bigger version of the same idea. Plug a USB MIDI keyboard into your machine, turn it on under the audio options, pick your keyboard from the list, equip an instrument and start playing. A real piano keyboard, driving your lute. The sustain pedal works. Everyone standing near you hears exactly what you played, at the volumes you played it.

And that word volumes is doing a lot of work, because how hard you strike a key has never changed anything in this game, by any method of playing, ever. Every hand played note came out at precisely one loudness. The reason is almost funny. The loudness of a note was being measured, and carried through the system, all the way along, and then dropped at the very last step before it reached your ears. All that information, faithfully transported to the end of the line and thrown in the bin. It is not thrown in the bin now. Play softly and it is soft. Lean on it and it rings. There are four touch settings if your keyboard is more or less sensitive than you would like.

We also raised the ceiling on how many notes can sound at once, because it had been set for eight keys, which is one hand. A ten finger chord lost two notes as you struck it, and a fast two handed passage dropped notes for as long as it went on. Middle C on a MIDI keyboard plays the same note the one key plays, so there is no second layout to learn, and notes past either end of your instrument's range are left unplayed rather than sounded at some wrong pitch. If nothing works, type slash midi and a panel tells you which keyboard is connected, whether the game is listening, the last note it heard and how hard it was struck. A keyboard that stays silent has about six possible reasons and every one of them looks identical from where the player is sitting.

Which brings me to the thing you would actually want a keyboard for. Until yesterday this game shipped with one period tune. One. As of last night it has seventy six.

Seventy five songs went in, all of them public domain and all of them properly of the period. Fifteen country dances out of Playford's English Dancing Master of sixteen fifty one. The Susato and Praetorius four part dance books. Ravenscroft's rounds. Dowland, Purcell, Carolan, and the Scots and Irish collections. Every single piece is arranged for fifteen instrument channels, so a lute player hears the melody, a harper hears the harmony, and someone lugging a One Man Band around hears the entire ensemble at once.

Each song also carries its own paperwork. There is a ledger recording, for every piece, the composer, the first publication, the exact edition it was made from, that edition's year, and where a copy of that edition lives. If a song is in the client without a row in that ledger, the build fails. I have been making games long enough to have firm views about music rights, and the view is: write it down, write it down at the time, and let the machine yell at you if you forget.

You do not simply receive all seventy five, either. Stan Clarke the Bard, in Soltown, teaches the library. Ask him about his songbook, bring him blank sheet music, and he copies out one tradition at a time. Fifteen country dances first, then the rounds, then the older ballad tunes, ten batches in all. They land in your inventory and appear in your playlist immediately. There is also a Helpful Guide to Sheet Music sold in bookshops, which names the converter tools the community has maintained for years, says plainly that they belong to other people and not to us, and writes down the band file format and the note limits, none of which have ever been documented inside the game.

The very first song somebody wrote by hand found a bug for us, which is about the correct hit rate. A chord length written the standard way, outside the bracket, was being discarded by the music parser. The part kept its correct bar count and then played through in a third of the time. One instrument sprinting off ahead of everyone else and finishing early, quite pleased with itself. The build now refuses any song whose parts do not all end together.

And you can play together properly at last. Type slash band and a name, and you are in an ensemble with everyone in the scene using that same name. No party invitation, no size limit, and it works straight across guild lines, so a festival can put forty players from a dozen guilds into one piece of music. Add a password if you want a private one, and neither the name nor the password ever leaves your own machine. Type slash band on its own and it reads back your band and an eight character code for it. Everyone in the same band sees the same code, so two friends who meant to play together and somehow did not can compare codes and find out which of them fat fingered the name.

The old ensemble was capped at party size, and that cap had been hiding three separate faults in the bookkeeping underneath. My favourite by a long way: a performer who stopped playing and wandered off left their slot behind them, and the next player to pick up an instrument inherited it, and began performing the departed musician's song. You did not choose it. You did not know it. You just picked up a lute and something else started playing through you. We have fixed the haunted lute, and part of me is sorry.

Away from the music now, to something that has been owed to you for a very long time. This game has counted your deeds for years. Creatures felled, places found, things made. It has counted every one of them, faithfully, and given you absolutely nowhere to read any of it. There is a new Achievements tab on your character sheet and a full journal window of its own, everything sorted by category with progress bars, the earned ones marked, and from now on the date you earned them.

The kill ladders fold into a single line each, so a creature family reads as one row saying six hundred and thirteen of a thousand instead of four rows all repeating the same number at you. That takes two hundred and forty eight authored achievements down to about a hundred and forty lines worth reading. And on its very first run the journal exposed a counting fault: the crafting achievements measure a total assembled out of two separate counters, and asking for that total directly comes back as zero. Which means the Legendary Crafter row would have shown a flat empty bar to somebody who earned the thing years ago.

Sorry about that. Progress and earned state now both go through the same arithmetic the unlock check uses.

Then we filled it out, because a life in this world is not only fighting. Seeds planted and plants harvested. Resource nodes and water sources gathered. Creatures tamed, with all one hundred and seventy seven tameable creatures counted individually across fourteen families. Fishing has its own collection now, thirty kinds of fish, twenty four out of water and six out of lava, each with a first catch deed. Every craft discipline counts, cooking, blacksmithing, tailoring, carpentry, alchemy and thirteen more, each with an apprentice to master chain, plus a counter for recipes learned. And winning at a game table counts. Chess, checkers and backgammon. Only against another person, mind you. Beating the computer earns you nothing, and neither does a game your opponent resigned, abandoned or quietly timed out of. We know exactly how some of you would have farmed that one.

Twenty four towns now have an Explorer achievement, and the deed arrives the instant you reach the last landmark rather than waiting for your next login. Reading through every town's landmark list turned up some older embarrassments in the data, too. Six spots carrying names copied from a different town entirely. Two towns filing their virtue shrines under a third town's name. And seven separate places in Ardoris all sharing one name, so reaching any single one of them marked all seven as found. Ardoris was, briefly, the easiest town in the world to explore.

There is one more piece and it is my favourite of the lot. There is a new World Events channel, a shard wide feed that the world speaks on and nobody types into. It arrives switched on in your main tab with its own checkbox. And twenty one landmark bosses now announce their own deaths to everyone online. The Frost Giant. The eight Cabalists. The eight Ancient dragons. The four Elemental Lords. The announcement names who landed the killing blow, how many stood with them, and where it happened. And when one of them falls, the entire realm celebrates. Every player online earns ten percent more adventurer experience for the next hour, wherever they happen to be standing. Log in during that hour and you join it partway through and are told how long is left. A second landmark kill inside the window resets the clock, and it never lowers the bonus. Somebody else's triumph, three zones away, now buys your evening a drink.

The player dungeons had a full day of their own. The headline is that your dungeon can now hold a prize. There is a Dungeon Prize Chest you place inside, and you stock it with your own gold. The first visitor who clears your dungeon opens it and takes the lot. While the dungeon is open to the public and running in Adventure Mode your stake is committed, so nobody can fight their way to the bottom and watch the reward evaporate as they reach for it. Close the dungeon and you may take your stake back whenever you please. The gold moves from one player to another and nothing is conjured out of nowhere, which is rather the point. There is nothing here to farm. The entrance advertises the prize before anyone walks in.

Traps became real as well. Three pieces you can place and wire together with your own hands: a pressure plate, a shrieking gargoyle that makes a horrible noise and takes no health from anybody, and a snuffer brazier that puts out every torch in its room. The gargoyle being harmless is deliberate. The first version of this kit is not going to be usable for hurting your guests. Right click a placed piece, choose Connect To, and it lists the other pieces standing in the same room, and effect pieces get a second menu for how long they wait and whether they arm themselves again afterward. The builder panel will tell you what is wrong, too, naming the piece: a plate connected to nothing, an effect nothing sets off, a piece you never wired at all.

The brazier had a defect during development that I want on the record forever. It carries a torch of its own, for the very sensible reason that a builder needs to see where the piece is. So the first working version put out every torch in the room, including its own, and vanished.

And the mode switch finally cleans up after itself. Adventure Mode was only ever a gate on new spawns, so anything already standing in your dungeon stayed exactly where it was when you flipped over to Decoration Mode. Owners have been placing furniture around live monsters this whole time. The dungeon clears three times over now, and the creatures that had lost their spawner link, which sat in no list and answered to nothing in the game, are hunted down by walking the world itself. Your pets, your summons and your living decorations are left alone. While we were at it we discovered that the Cave Stone Lava Grotto room, the one sold without spawns, was placing nine fire elementals and skeletons entirely of its own accord. Sold without spawns. Nine of them. Removed, and a test now refuses any dungeon room that ships a creature seat the cleanup cannot see.

Right. Some smaller things that will improve somebody's evening. Settings that used to undo themselves, first. Your option changes now reach the disk within a couple of seconds of you making them, where before they were only written on a clean quit, so a crash or the launcher shutting the game down on patch day threw away everything you had changed that session. The updater also stopped deleting the language you picked, which it had been doing on every single patch, sending you back to auto detect. Belladonnarose reported that one. Container settings save while the container's own window is open now, instead of flipping back a second later with a message saying the item could not be changed, and a decoration setting the server turns down puts the old value back on screen and tells you why.

My favourite of the small ones. If a scene reloaded while you had a crafting window open, which is exactly what a player dungeon does when its owner switches modes, the game went on believing you were standing at the crafting station you left behind. And it then refused to open any crafting station, anywhere in the world, for the rest of your session, until you went back to character select. Twenty seven lines to fix. Reported by a player who I imagine spent a while wondering what they had done wrong.

Things that were painted on top of other things also had a day. Hover text on list rows in the social, party, guild and mail windows had been drawing above everything else on screen, including item tooltips and including the icon of an item you were in the middle of dragging. The combo highlight on the combat bar now closes all the way around the slot at a single weight, after a tester noticed the bottom edge was still dark. The corner darkening that warns you are walking out of a scene no longer disappears when you switch the vignette off in the display controls. And the world map keeps asking for a zone map if the zone was still loading when it first asked, which is why the Oracle Temple insisted no map existed for as long as you stood in it. The decoration bar in the new client was rebuilt back to the layout you know, after it had unrolled itself into a single row of tiny meters stretched all the way across the bottom of your screen.

The lightning round. The Shardfall zones got a thorough scrubbing: blurry boulders, blurry tree bark, blurry tendrilled plants, a storm cloud being held at low resolution behind everyone's back, a red river that stopped nearly three metres short of its own bank, waterfalls landing on a perfectly straight line, obsidian shards swinging through the rocks beside them, torches buried inside boulders making the rock face glow orange from within, and fallen trees rendering like folded paper. Almost every one of those came from Garfunkel Humperdinck, who at this point has personally audited every rock in the Shardfalls and found most of them wanting.

Twenty three reported bugs went down in total. Among them: the Sample Dungeon option was retired from entrances, because on the older preset ones it dropped you into an unlit empty scene with recall as your only way out. Soothing Rain now rolls its chance to strip a fire effect on every tick of the rain, the way the description has always claimed, instead of rolling once at the moment of casting and then standing there getting wet. The puzzle box runes are centred and its tally sheet fits all ten guesses. A technical status line intended for developers had been reaching players in chat and forcing the chat window open as you arrived in a town. The New Crafters Town hedges got their leaves and flowers back after several years of being flat grey slabs. Add ons can send readable emotes now, held to exactly what a player could type by hand. And a string harvester stopped dead on one indented tooltip line, holding a hundred and ninety four translations hostage behind it until somebody moved a single space.

On the design side we published The Unseen Trade, twenty four proposals for the Subterfuge tree, with a comment thread and vote arrows on every one. It opens with an honesty pass, and the honesty is bracing. Every trainer in the world sells you Pick Lock, a skill with no implementation behind it whatsoever. The Poison Weapon passive earns experience that no formula anywhere reads. Go and read it, and vote for the parts you want, including a proper stealth indicator, guards who investigate a noise, real lockpicking, trapped chests, and pickpocketing aimed at people who deserve it.

That is the day. Big one. I am looking forward, more than I can properly express, to standing in a town square and hearing forty players from a dozen guilds playing the same country dance from sixteen fifty one, badly, at slightly different volumes because they are all hitting the keys differently now.

And I did promise you one terrible thing.

We fixed that bug where an abandoned performance slot made your lute play a departed musician's song. Which is a shame, really. That is the closest this game has ever come to having a ghost writer. Good night, my friends.